A Criminal History of Mankind (7 page)

Durkheim also observed a type of suicide that corresponds roughly to ‘motiveless murder’; he called it
suicide anomique
, suicide due to lack of norms or values. Bachelors have a higher suicide rate than married men. Moreover, during times of war, the suicide rate drops; it rises again in times of peace and prosperity. (In 1981, the Lebanon Hospital for Mental Disorders recorded that admissions rise during the cease-fires and drop when the shooting starts.) From this, Durkheim deduced that people need social limits to keep them balanced and sane. Suicide is, therefore, a ‘social act’ not an individual one. He concludes that there are ‘suicidal currents’ in society that act mechanically on individuals and force a number of them to commit suicide. The same argument could obviously be applied to
crime anomique
, the type of crime committed by socially rootless individuals such as Thurneman, Manson, Brady, Frazier.

The arguments of this chapter have placed us in a position to see precisely where Durkheim was mistaken. He believed that it is the individual’s
social
orientation that leads to suicide (or crime - as we shall see later, there is a close connection). But our study of the relation between crime and ‘hypnosis’ has shown that this fails to get to the heart of the matter. It is true that society provides norms and values; but these in turn provide a
sense of reality
, the essential factor in preventing both suicide and crime. The most amazing realisation that emerges from the study of hypnosis is that our sense of reality is so easily undermined. In chickens it can be done with a chalk line or a bent piece of wood on the beak; in frogs, with a few taps on the stomach. In human beings that process is slightly more complicated, but not much. Völgyesi talks about the ‘law of point reflexes’, which states that any monotonously repeated stimulus of the same point in the cerebral cortex produces compulsive sleepiness. Similarly, our eyes cannot focus for long on unmoving objects; they keep de-focusing. It takes a sudden movement to shake the ‘controlling ego’ awake again, to ‘restore us to reality’.

It is this sense of reality that makes the difference between suicide or non-suicide. Durkheim was therefore mistaken. The ‘social currents’ certainly exist; but they are only the secondary cause of crime or suicide. The primary cause must be sought in the psychology of the individual.

Does this mean that Durkheim’s opponents were right? No, for they argued that suicide can
only
be understood in psychological terms, and Durkheim proved them wrong. It must be understood in social and psychological terms. And if we are to understand the basic patterns of criminal behaviour - and therefore how to combat it - the search for patterns must be continued on both levels.

A REPORT ON THE VIOLENT MAN

On 13 December 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army marched into Nanking, in Central China, and began what has been described as ‘one of the most savage acts of mass terror in modern times’ - a campaign of murder, rape and torture that lasted for two months. Chinese soldiers had divested themselves of their uniforms and mixed with the civilian population, in the belief that the Japanese would spare them if they were unarmed. The Japanese began rounding them up and shooting them in huge numbers, using machine-guns. The bodies - some twenty thousand of them - were thrown into heaps, dowsed with petrol, and set alight; hundreds who were still alive died in the flames. Because they were indistinguishable from the soldiers, male civilians were also massacred. Women were herded into pens which became virtually brothels for the Japanese soldiers; more than twenty thousand women between the ages of eleven and eighty were raped, and many disembowelled. Many who were left alive committed ritual suicide, the traditional response of Chinese women to violation. Boys of school age were suspended by their hands for days, and then used for bayonet practice. Rhodes Farmer, a journalist who worked in Shanghai came into possession of photographs of mass executions of boys by beheading, of rapes of women by Japanese soldiers, and of ‘slaughter pits’ in which soldiers were encouraged to develop their killer-instinct by bayoneting tied prisoners. When published in the American magazine
Look
, they caused worldwide condemnation, and the Japanese commander was recalled to Tokyo. The odd thing was that these photographs were taken by the Japanese themselves; for they regarded the atrocities as simply acts of revenge. In two months, more than fifty thousand people died in Nanking, and towards two hundred thousand in the surrounding countryside. (In 1982 - when the Chinese were quarrelling with the Japanese about their ‘rewriting’ of history - the official Chinese figure was three hundred and forty thousand.)

Some six hundred miles to the north-west of Nanking, the city of Peking was   already   in   Japanese   hands. But the village of Chou-kou-tien, thirty miles to the south-west, was still held by Chinese Nationalists, and there a team of international scientists were collaborating on a project that had created immense excitement in archaeological circles. In 1929, a young palaeontologist named Pie Wen-Chung had discovered in the caves near Chou-kou-tien the petrified skull of one of man’s earliest ancestors. It looked more like a chimpanzee than a human being, and the Catholic scientist Teilhard de Chardin thought the teeth were those of a beast of prey. It had a sloping forehead, enormous brow-ridges and a receding chin. But the brain was twice as big as that of a chimpanzee. And as more skulls, limbs and teeth were discovered, it became clear that this beast of prey had walked upright. At first, it looked as if this was a cross between ape and man - what earlier anthropologists such as Haeckel had called ‘the missing link’. Nearly half a century earlier the missing link theory had apparently been confirmed when the bones of an ‘ape-man’ had been discovered in Java. The ape-man of Peking clearly belonged to the same species. But the caves of the Chou-kou-tien hills yielded evidence that this was no missing link. Peking man had constructed hearths and used fire to roast his food - his favourite meal seems to have been venison. He was therefore more culturally advanced than had been supposed. This creature, who lived more than half a million years ago, was a true human being.

He was also, it seemed, a cannibal. All the forty skulls discovered at Chou-kou-tien were mutilated at the base, creating a gap into which a hand could be inserted to scoop out the brains. Franz Weidenreich, the scientist in charge of the investigation, declared that these creatures had been slaughtered in a body, dragged into the caves and there roasted and eaten. By whom? Presumably by other Peking men. In other caves in the area, bones of Cro-Magnon man were discovered, and here too there was evidence of cannibalism; but Cro-Magnon man came on the scene more than four hundred thousand years later; he could not have been the culprit. The evidence of the Chou-kou-tien caves revealed that Peking man had fought against the wild beasts who occupied the caves and had wiped them out; after that, he had fought against his fellow men and eaten them. While editorials around the world were asking how civilised men could massacre the population of a large city, the Peking excavations were suggesting an unpalatable answer: that man has always been a killer of his own species.

Nowadays, that view seems uncontroversial enough; the threat of atomic annihilation has accustomed us to take a pessimistic view of the human race. But in 1937, the ‘killer ape’ idea met with strong resistance among scientists. According to the theory that had been current since the 1890s,
homo sapiens
had evolved because of his intelligence. He started life as a gentle, vegetarian creature, like his brother the ape, then slowly learned such skills as hunting and agriculture and created civilisation. In his book on Peking Man, Dr Harry L. Shapiro, one of the scientists at Chou-kou-tien, does not even mention the mutilations in the base of the skulls; he prefers to believe they were damaged by falling rock and layers of debris. But new evidence continued to erode the older view. As early as 1924, the palaeontologist Raymond Dart had discovered an even older species of ‘ape-man’, which he called Australopithecus (or southern ape-man). In the late 1940s, examining an Australopithecus site near Sterkfontein, Dart found many shattered baboon skulls. Looking at a club-like antelope thighbone, he was struck by a sudden thought. He lifted the bone and brought it down heavily on the back of one of the baboon skulls. The two holes made by the protuberances of the leg joint were identical with similar holes on the other skulls. Dart had discovered the weapon with which the ‘first man’ had killed baboons. It seemed to verify that similar thighbones found in the caves of Peking man had also been weapons..

In 1949, Dart published a paper containing his claim that Australopithecus - who lived about two million years ago - had discovered the use of weapons. Fellow scientists declined to take the idea seriously. In 1953, he repeated the offence with a paper called
The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man
, which so worried the editor of the
International Anthropological and Linguistic Review
that he prefaced it with a note disclaiming responsibility for its opinions. For in this paper Dart advanced the revolutionary thesis that ‘southern ape-man’ had emerged from among the apes for one reason only: because he had learned to commit murder with weapons. Our remote ancestors, he said, learned to stand and walk upright because they needed their hands to carry their bone clubs. Hands replaced teeth for tearing chunks of meat from animal carcases, so our teeth became smaller and our claws disappeared to be replaced by nails. Hitting an animal with a club - or hurling a club or stone at it from a distance - meant a new kind of co-ordination between the hand and eye; and so the brain began to develop.

At the time Dart was writing his paper, there was one remarkable piece of evidence for the older view that ‘intelligence came first’. This was the famous Piltdown skull, discovered in a gravel pit in 1913. It had a jaw like an ape but its brain was the same size as that of modern man. Then, forty years later, tests at the British Museum revealed that the Piltdown skull was a hoax - the skull of a modern man and the jawbone of an ape, both stained by chemicals to look alike. The revelation of the hoax came in the same year that Dart’s paper was published, and it went a long way towards supporting Dart’s views. The brain of Australopithecus was larger than that of an ape, but it was far smaller than that of modern man.

In the early 1960s, two remarkable books popularised this disturbing thesis about man’s killer instincts:
African Genesis
by Robert Ardrey and
On Aggression
by Konrad Lorenz. Both argued, in effect, that man became man because of his aggressiveness, and that we should not be surprised by war, crime and violent behaviour because they are part of our very essence. Ardrey’s final chapter was grimly entitled: ‘Cain’s Children’. Yet both Ardrey and Lorenz were guardedly optimistic, Lorenz pointing out that man’s aggressions can be channelled into less dangerous pursuits - such as sport and exploration - while Ardrey declared, with more hope than conviction, that man’s instinct for order and civilisation is just as powerful as his destructiveness. Ardrey even ends with a semi-mystical passage about a mysterious presence called ‘the keeper of the kinds’, a force behind life that makes for order. Yet the overall effect of both books is distinctly pessimistic.

The same may be said for the view put forward by Arthur Koestler in
The Ghost in the Machine
(1967). Koestler points out: ‘
Homo sapiens
is virtually unique in the animal kingdom in his lack of instinctive safeguards against the killing of conspecifics - members of his own species.’ (He might have added that he is also one of the few creatures who has no instinctive revulsion against cannibalism -dogs, for example, cannot be persuaded to eat dog meat.) Koestler’s explanation is that the human brain is an evolutionary blunder. It consists of three brains, one on top of the other: the reptile brain, the mammalian brain and, on top of these, the human neo-cortex. The result, as the physiologist P. D. Maclean remarked, is that when a psychiatrist asks the patient to lie down on the couch he is asking him to stretch out alongside a horse and a crocodile. The human brain has developed at such an incredible pace in the past half million years that physiologists talk about a ‘brain explosion’ and compare its growth to that of a tumour. The trouble says Koestler, is that instead of
transforming
the old brain into the new - as the forelimb of the earliest reptiles became a bird’s wing and a man’s hand - evolution has merely superimposed a new structure on top of the old one and their powers overlap. We are a ‘mentally unbalanced species’, whose logic is always being undermined by emotion. ‘To put it crudely: evolution has left a few screws loose between the neo-cortex and the hypothalamus’, and the result is that man has a dangerous ‘paranoid streak’ which explains his self-destructiveness.

Inevitably, there was a reaction against the pessimism. In
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
(1974), the veteran Freudian Erich Fromm flatly contradicts Dart, Ardrey and Lorenz, and argues that there is no evidence that our remote ancestors were basically warlike and aggressive. ‘Almost everyone reasons: if civilised man is so warlike, how much more warlike must primitive man have been! But [Quincy] Wright’s results [in
A Study of War
] confirm the thesis that the most primitive men are the least warlike and that war likeness grows in proportion to civilisation.’ And in a television series called
The Making of Mankind
(broadcast in 1981), Richard Leakey, son of the anthropologist Louis Leakey (whose investigations into ‘southern ape-man’ had been widely cited by Ardrey to support his thesis) left no doubt about his opposition to the killer ape theory. Everything we know about primitive man, he said, suggests that he lived at peace with the world and his neighbours; it was only after man came to live in cities that he became cruel and destructive. This is also the view taken by Fromm in
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
.